


Real Person

by boxoftheskyking



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: F/M, Pre-Slash, Stream of Consciousness, suicide talk
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-03
Updated: 2013-07-03
Packaged: 2017-12-17 12:27:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,013
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/867551
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/boxoftheskyking/pseuds/boxoftheskyking
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Derek is bleeding on Jennifer's coffee table and Jennifer's brain is spiraling.</p>
<p>(similar in style to Summertime, but not necessarily related)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Real Person

She’s supposed to be keeping a journal. It’s sitting on the corner of the coffee table, one of those hard-covered spiral-bound ones with pictures of birds on it. Her mother keeps giving her these journals, has ever since she was a kid. Every birthday, every Hanukkah. The lines are too far apart; the spacing doesn’t work with her handwriting.

Dr. Ives tells her to keep a journal. She actually made an effort for about a week and a half, but then gave up. It’s supposed to help her feel in control, so when she starts to get overwhelmed she can write down her thoughts and impulses and keep them contained.

The Man is slumped on the coffee table, and he’s bleeding on the edge of her journal.

Dr. Ives would rather be called Jen, but Jennifer would rather not. When she found out Ives was a Jennifer, too, she almost canceled the first appointment. It seemed a petty reason to start over, so she didn’t.

The Man’s been asleep for twenty minutes now. He woke up once and shouted at her for leaving the blinds open, and she startled so badly she bruised her knee on the edge of the corner of the coffee table. She can stand up for herself; she’s perfectly capable of standing up for herself; her first teaching job was at an all-boys middle school, of course she can. But only when she’s prepared for it, and she wasn’t ready for the fury in his voice when he shouted at her.

He’d seemed softer, earlier. He seems softer, now. He apologized and then passed out again. She hasn’t yet decided if that makes it all okay.

Watching skin knit itself back together is a bit like watching paint dry.

"I have a diagnosed anxiety disorder, you know," she says to him. He growls a little, so at least he isn’t dead. “At least you aren’t dead. If you were dead I would take the rest of the semester off and move somewhere for a few months, just in case reporters wanted to ask me questions. They’d find out you were here. There’s a lot of evidence."

Her mother kept giving her those stupid journals and books like  _Publishing for Dummies._ She would tell the aunts, “Jenny is quite a little writer." Jennifer hated that. She didn’t want to be a little writer, she wanted to be a real person. And she wasn’t Jenny. 

"Sometimes, if a CD starts skipping, I feel like I’m going to throw up."

He doesn’t say anything.

"My therapist says it’s a control thing. I can’t go to school plays anymore, because when they forget their lines I start thinking about suicide."

That’s in the journal, the suicide list. It’s a pros and cons list of different methods, culled from years of research. Her Masters thesis was on suicides in British literature. Basically. It had fancier language than that in the abstract, but it was basically just a bunch of suicides that she liked. She keeps thinking about a PhD, but then there are papers to grade and she’s out of Easy Mac and her mother calls to complain about the brothers and she runs out of the energy necessary to care.

It wasn’t right for him to shout at her like that, not after all she went through to get him here. He weighs about a thousand pounds.

"You weigh about a thousand pounds, you know. I’m not a fucking Olympian or anything. There’s no reason to shout at people who don’t know what’s going on."

He doesn’t say anything, but the gash in the side of his neck is half the size it was twenty minutes ago.

"If I knew what was happening and then I did something stupid, that would be one thing. That would be fair."

There were five girls in her high school English class named Jennifer, and four of them entered the same poetry slam when she was a junior. That’s when she decided she couldn’t be a writer. Her mother had ruined her for writing by giving her the wrong name. You can’t do anything substantial if your name is Jennifer, you just can’t.

"There’s no reason to go around shouting at people."

She can’t really be mad at him, though, because last year when she was teaching freshmen in Oakland one of her boys lost his dad unexpectedly right after winter break. Tim Warren. He was a good kid, most of the time, and decently smart, but after that he got so erratic. He’d yell and once he threw a chair at her and he’d be so angry, so angry all the time, but it was obvious it wasn’t her he was angry at. He’d bring her books he thought she’d like that he found at the used book store downtown and he’d pick her lilacs on the way to school, and he’d apologize.

She kind of got it. In theory. She doesn’t get mad like that, though. Control is a thing, for her.

"I think you’d be more comfortable on the couch," she says to him. He grunts a little.

"Hey. Get up on the couch so I can see if you’re bleeding. Hey, guy. Hey!"

He starts awake, knocks her journal off the table. It’s soggy and browning and open to one of the suicide lists. She has a sudden moment of vertigo, which always happens when she starts to doubt her own reality and think she may be a character in a post-modern short story.

But there are no werewolves in post-modern short stories. Not in good ones, anyway. Not that she’s read.

"Get up on the couch, let me see you."

He winces and looks up at her, wide-eyed, like a little kid.

"Okay," he says - croaks, really, and when he lays down he won’t look her in the eye. He’ll flick his eyes up to look at her, or right over her shoulder, but if she catches him he’ll twitch and look away

She shouldn’t like that as much as she does.


End file.
